"I hear Spike Lee's shooting down the street," sang an East Village denizen in the musical Rent. As Rent approached the end of its storied run, the words briefly gained literal truth: Elsewhere on Broadway, fellow acclaimed rock musical Passing Strange was closing after just a few months, with Lee documenting its final performances. The director had once circled the film version of Rent, eventually directed by Chris Columbus; he ought to do another proper musical some day, as it fits his natural, vivid intensity. In the meantime, we’ve got the director’s film version of Passing Strange, more a cross between a PBS-style special and a concert movie.

Narrated by its author/co-composer/lyricist Stew, Passing Strange follows a young man (Daniel Breaker) from his teenage years into his twenties, a journey of self-discovery in which he wrestles with his identity as a middle-class black man as well as an aspiring artist and songwriter. Lee plays against the story’s somewhat epic scope, presenting the trip with what seems, at first, like blatant theatricality: Shot on the stage, there are very few sets; all of the actors apart from Breaker slip in and out of roles as the hero changes locations; and Stew's backing band occasionally chimes in to comment on the action.

But the show moves through musical numbers and personal crises with more cohesion than many more traditionally polished and structured pieces. It has both the fluidity and seeming spontaneity of performance art, only without too much pretension -- although I did wonder, at one point, if anyone realized how much they sounded like Morpheus when referring to "the real," the play's catch-all term for the vague sense of self for which Breaker strives.

But mainly, Lee's film documents the electric energy of Stew's show, complete with its breathless, talented, and extremely sweaty actors. The performances naturally look a bit bigger up close; Rebecca Naomi Jones, as several characters expressing a sustained love interest for Breaker once he hits Berlin, spends a lot of time pulling faces – or rather, a particular eyes-out, mouth-tugged-down, SNL-level face -- that may not have been as visible to a live theater audience.

Lee finds pleasing images on the show's busy but not overcrowded stage, often fitting his camera into spaces the audience can't access: close-ups of band members, shots of the crowd from a stage point of view, a brief intermission interlude following the actors scurrying around backstage, and a few swooping crane shots at key moments, not to mention all of that glistening actorly sweat. But with a fixed performance, his cutting can't be as rhythmic; the performance can't pop with the exuberance of the best movie musicals (or, for that matter, many of Lee's own bracing films). As a record of an idiosyncratic show that not enough people got to see, Passing Strange does its job. If it gets Spike Lee thinking about making more musicals, too, then all the better.